Caste, a shadow in 2017 India

On October 13, the Supreme Court threw out a petition seeking to ban a book by Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd.

Shepherd is a Dalit scholar who, over decades, has researched and published on atrocities and humiliations inflicted on lower caste folk by upper castes.

The Supreme Court upheld the right to free expression, freedom of speech and so on. This is welcome.

Indians talk big about democracy, justice and rights, but when it comes to books, we develop ultra-thin skins and shed our vertebrae. Formally or informally, we’ve banned books ranging from a novel by Salman Rushdie to a historical study of Shivaji and even a biography of tycoon Dhirubhai Ambani.

Voltaire said he might entirely disagree with the views of someone, but would die to support his right to air those views.

Ilaiah aspires to the standards of scholarship practiced by Bhimrao Ambedkar: logic, evidence and illustrations from texts or real life.

Both expose how conservative Hinduism is blind to social justice and its toxic outcomes.

If you’re reading this, chances are you believe that ‘meritocracy’, not affirmative action like reservations, is the way for Indians to get ahead. Our affirmative action reserves seats in primary and higher education and some jobs for backward castes and tribes – in government institutions. Since Dalits pay the same taxes as anyone else, governments must plough some of it back for affirmative action.

We now have a Dalit president, the second one after KR Narayanan. Mayawati, a qualified lawyer from the University of Delhi, overcame twin handicaps of being a woman and Dalit, to become chief minister of Uttar Pradesh four times.

Private Sector

Our private sector opposes affirmative action, especially job quotas for disadvantaged Indians. With very few exceptions, India Inc. blathers about ‘meritocracy’ to keep minorities and lower castes from soiling their precincts. Anecdotally, most traditional businesses are dominated by Baniyas or Vaishyas, one of the three top varnas.

Surely, things must have changed for the better in 21st century India? Pooh. Post-liberalisation,India’s top new companies have been manned at the helm by upper castes.

Anecdotes can mislead. But in 2012, D Ajit, Han Donker and Ravi Saxena of the University of Northern British Columbia published a startling study of the relationship between caste and corporate control in India, in the Economic & Political Weekly (‘Corporate Boards in India: Blocked By Caste?’ August 11, 2012, goo.gl/nuu8MN).

Of the 4,000-odd Indian companies listed at home or overseas, they selected the top 1,000 by asset size. Of these, they found upper castes, including numerically small ones like Syrian Christians, formed 92.7% of the members of top Indian corporate boards. Of these, 46% were Vaishyas and 44.6% Brahmins.

Does this imply some kind of upper caste, male solidarity to keep lower castes and women out? To answer that, they used a test that measures diversity among a population, called the Blau index.

They found that 70% of all company boards were entirely forward-caste and male; the overall tendency, measured by something called ‘skewness’, was to perpetuate this norm.

Indians love any scrap of praise thrown our way by the US. Remember, in 1955, President Lyndon Johnson signed rules that force any company with contracts worth $50,000 or more with government to follow affirmative action. This doesn’t enforce quotas, but measurable standards of ethnic and gender diversity. Even private companies with no government sales follow these rules.

Farm Performance

This year, Shankar Rao of the Council for Social Development, Hyderabad, published a landmark paper in EPW. He asked whether and how caste affected farm performance. Dissecting data from National Sample Survey Office (NSSO) surveys, Rao found lower castes grow crops that fetch lower prices, have lower productivity and rely more on highcost moneylenders, compared to upper castes.

For example, in the high-output kharif (monsoon) season, the average scheduled caste (SC) farm household makes Rs 38,000 worth of crop per hectare (pHa). Its upper caste counterpart makes nearly Rs 54,300 pHa. SC farmers can afford inputs worth Rs15,200 pHa; upper castes spend more than Rs 19,000. SC farmers, who grow less than 17% of their total output as cash crops, make less money than upper castes, 26% of whose output is devoted to commercial crops. SCs borrow 57% of their loans from highcost informal lenders, compared to 44.7% for upper castes.

A 2,100-year-old casteist, violently exploitative and misogynistic text called the Manusmriti was supposed to have guided our ancestors’ ideas about right and wrong. We believe we’ve come a long way since. But from factory to farm, many of its economically crippling practices continue to thrive.